What are some ideas about poets and poetry proposed by William Wordsworth in his "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)?

Wordsworth’s monumental poetic legacy rests on a large
number of important poems, varying in length and weight from the short, simple lyrics of
the 1790s to the vast expanses of The Prelude, thirteen books long
in its 1808 edition. But the themes that run through Wordsworth’s poetry, and the
language and imagery he uses to embody those themes, remain remarkably consistent
throughout the Wordsworth canon, adhering largely to the tenets Wordsworth set out for
himself in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads. Here, Wordsworth
argues that poetry should be written in the natural language of common speech, rather
than in the lofty and elaborate dictions that were then considered“poetic.” He argues
that poetry should offer access to the emotions contained in memory. And he argues that
the first principle of poetry should be pleasure, that the chief duty of poetry is to
provide pleasure through a rhythmic and beautiful expression of feeling—for all human
sympathy, he claims, is based on a subtle pleasure principle that is “the naked and
native dignity of man.”

Recovering “the naked and native
dignity of man” makes up a significant part of Wordsworth’s poetic project, and he
follows his own advice from the 1802 preface. Wordsworth’s style remains plain-spoken
and easy to understand even today, though the rhythms and idioms of common English have
changed from those of the early nineteenth century. Many of Wordsworth’s poems
(including masterpieces such as “Tintern Abbey” and the “Intimations of Immortality”
ode) deal with the subjects of childhood and the memory of childhood in the mind of the
adult in particular, childhood’s lost connection with nature, which can be preserved
only in memory. Wordsworth’s images and metaphors mix natural scenery, religious
symbolism (as in the sonnet “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,” in which the
evening is described as being “quiet as a nun”),and the relics of the poet’s rustic
childhood—cottages, hedgerows, orchards, and other places where humanity intersects
gently and easily with nature.

Wordsworth’s poems initiated
the Romantic era by emphasizing feeling, instinct, and pleasure above formality and
mannerism. More than any poet before him, Wordsworth gave expression to inchoate human
emotion; his lyric “Strange fits of passion have I known,”in which the speaker describes
an inexplicable fantasy he once had that his lover was dead, could not have been written
by any previous poet. Curiously for a poet whose work points so directly toward the
future, many of Wordsworth’s important works are preoccupied with the lost glory of the
past—not only of the lost dreams of childhood but also of the historical past, as in the
powerful sonnet “London, 1802,”in which the speaker exhorts the spirit of the
centuries-dead poet John Milton to teach the modern world a better way to
live